In the autumn of 2024, a shocking court case out of France made headlines around the world: A man named Dominique Pelicot had been arrested for repeatedly drugging his wife of 50 years and inviting dozens of other men to rape her while she slept. Over the course of a decade, he'd filmed every attack -- many of which he also participated in -- and after a painstaking investigation, police were able to identify and charge 50 men.
In France, sexual assault victims decide whether they want criminal proceedings to be public or private. This trial might have commenced and concluded unnoticed, but for the fact that the victim, Gisèle Pelicot, decided that the shame of these heinous crimes belonged not to her, but to the men who had raped her. If she opted for a private trial, they would be tried quietly, behind closed doors. So she refused anonymity. She requested that the trial be public, walking into the courtroom for weeks on end to face video footage of her own debasement. Publicly, she became an international hero. Privately, her world fell apart.
"A Hymn to Life" is Gisèle's staggering account of both the assaults and the life that preceded them, a life that she believed was built on an enviable marriage -- three children, two careers, a retirement rental in the South of France. When Dominique came to her crying one day in September 2020, her initial fear was that her husband was ill. Then he issued a confession: He'd been arrested for taking photos up the skirts of several women in a supermarket. Gisèle, stunned, decided that with therapy and apologies this infraction could be navigated; it wasn't "irreversible."
But when she was called to the police station a few months later, she learned that the investigators assigned to the supermarket incident had searched through all of Dominique's electronic files, and they now needed to show her some horrible photographs. In image after image a slack-jawed woman, naked or shoved into racy lingerie, was brutalized by a series of men. "I did not recognize those men. Nor that woman. Her cheek so floppy, her mouth so limp," Gisèle writes. While she tried to make sense of the images, the police tried to make her understand: The woman in the photographs was her.
The case of Gisèle Pelicot was astonishing for two reasons. The first was the depths of depravity to which Dominique and his accomplices eagerly stooped. No, not all men are assaulters or harassers -- as many defensive males informed us during the height of the #MeToo movement -- but this trial made it clear that any man could be: The convicted rapists included a firefighter, an IT professional, a restaurant manager, a journalist. The village of Mazan, where the couple lived, is hardly a booming metropolis, and yet Dominique was able to find more than 80 men (of whom about 30 the police never firmly identified) willing to come to his home, leave their clothes in a tidy pile by the door, and rape his wife.
The other incredible factor in the Pelicot case was, of course, Gisèle herself: the remarkable poise with which she carried herself in public, wearing a calm expression, trademark sunglasses and a chic bob. It doesn't escape my attention that, in a world that still often demands perfection from its survivors, Gisèle was an easy victim to applaud: a well-kept middle-class grandmother, no bawdy past, no hysterics. She didn't even need to ask the jury to believe women -- they only had to watch the tapes.
In "A Hymn to Life," she offers thoughtful explanations about what produced the stoicism for which she was praised: the early death of her beloved mother; the arrival of a cruel stepmother; the fact that from a young age she was left to largely fend for herself. By the time she met Dominique when she was 19, she already understood that life was hard. There was no choice other than to survive it, which she assumed she and her young husband would do together. Even as her marriage effectively ended in the police station, she found herself thinking about both their upcoming wedding anniversary and the day they first met: "His shy expression. His long, curly hair falling to his shoulders. His Breton sweater. He was going to love me. My brain shut down in Deputy Sergeant Perret's office."
"A Hymn to Life," written with French journalist Judith Perrignon, is a lyrical book about monstrous events; a compelling exploration of what it feels like to hold two existences in your brain at once.
One existence is the life Gisèle remembers, in which an adoring husband needs help picking out his clothes and plays with the grandkids while she’s at work. Another is the life she had no idea she was living: crimes that were being committed on her body—crimes that were causing her to wake up sore, suffer bizarre gynecologic issues and begin losing her hair—but of which she had no memory or awareness at all. Her husband clucked over her health and took her to the doctor; he also never ceased the assaults that caused her pain.
"Sometimes, after a house fire, a few walls are left standing; though blackened and burnt they are still there, perhaps showing the outline of an old staircase, a pattern of wallpaper that needed changing," she writes, describing how she managed to continue to have fond memories of the man who tortured her, how she could do things like deliver him fresh clothes in jail. "That's how it appeared to me in my mind; I was looking for a few relics among the ashes. ... I was fighting to keep those walls standing, to stay upright myself. If the last fifty years of my life were taken away from me, it would be as if I had never existed."
The reader sees shadows of Dominique's darkness flicker through even the early, allegedly happy years of her marriage -- his scars from childhood trauma; his increasingly insistent demand for sexual favors she wasn't comfortable with -- but a younger Gisèle had perceived those incidents as examples of the "natural law" that men want more and different sex than women.
All of this compartmentalizing and salvaging makes sense to Gisèle. But it does not make sense to her children, who now view their father as fully evil. And it is in the sequences about the assaults' reverberating effects on her family that the book truly rips the reader's heart because that is where the perfect victim's own human imperfections are revealed and where the story becomes more complex than even its teller seems to realize.
When police finally finished searching Dominique's devices, pictures of Gisèle weren't the only ones they found. There were also images of the couple's adult daughter, Caroline, asleep in underwear on two separate occasions. The images made Caroline panic. As she recounted in her own memoir published last year, she didn’t recognize the panties she was wearing; she was lying in a position unusual for her; and what’s more—as a notoriously light sleeper—she didn’t understand how the photographs could have been taken without waking her—unless, that is, her father potentially drugged her too.
But Gisèle diminishes this all-too-believable possibility in "A Hymn to Life," rationalizing that Caroline’s body does not look as limp as hers did in the photos of her assaults. “I kept trying to reassure her that it was implausible that he had raped her,” she writes, proposing that Caroline’s husband would likely have also been in the bed to ward off an attack. “I wasn’t trying to defend [Dominique]; I wanted to help my daughter.”
This explanation of a mother’s intent feels true. But it’s baffling and hurtful to Caroline, who understandably believes that it’s not “implausible” for her atrocious father to have committed additional atrocities. And there’s another compelling explanation for Gisèle’s dismissal that she doesn’t consider on the page: She might be able to somehow compartmentalize her own abuse. But to allow herself to weigh the possibility that she had spent her life with a man who had also assaulted her child would be more than she could bear. Caroline was searching for the truth. Gisèle was searching for a way to keep standing upright.
Their conflicting needs created irreparable tension between mother and daughter. But the entire Pelicot family was fractured by the acts of this vile man. The couple’s older son could not stop worrying about the times he left his young children alone with his father. Their younger son’s marriage ended when it came out that Dominique had also secretly recorded both of his daughters-in-law in the shower.
Should Gisèle have known that her husband was a monster? Should she have sensed something? Done something? She dedicates pages to wondering this, but the simple answer is no. Of course not.
There are bad things we can prepare for, and then there are things that no human could possibly guard against because doing so would require expecting grotesquerie that most of us cannot even envision.
But the more complex answer is what the book’s ultimate message seems to be: When something of this magnitude happens to you, there is no point in even asking these questions. There is no point in wondering what you should have done, should have seen, or how curly the hair was of the shy boy who promised to love you for the rest of his life. There is only whatever you do to put one foot in front of the other. There is only what it takes to survive.